Godmersham Park

“ James’s Park one of the most delightful scenes in Nature is the variety of living objects which is met with here; for besides the deer and wild fowl, common to other parks, besides the water, fine walks, and the elegant buildings that surround it, hither the politest part of the British nation of both sexes frequently resort in the spring to take the benefit of the evening air, and enjoy the most agreeable conversation imaginable ”

“ How wise that such places as Richmond, Greenwich, and such old parks in the neighbourhood of the Metropolis, are kept up and kept open, that our citizens may occasionally get out of the smoke and noise of the great Babel, and breathe all their freshness, and feel all their influence! Who does not often, in the midst of brick-and-mortar regions, summon up before his imagination this old park or forest scenery? ”

“ Afar off we could observe, through yawning gaps in the ancient and stately trees, which were pierced by the ruddy beams of sunlight, the tall towers and fair proportions of Goodwood House, the magnificent mansion of the Duke of Richmond. Twenty to twenty-five thousand people were gathered in the noble old Park whose vistas stretched off into dells, copses, and woodland nooks, for thousands of acres. ”

“ There are indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all its own. It is filled with magnificent foreign-looking trees, of which I know nothing but that they have a vain appearance of being chestnuts, planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children ”

“ Standing right in the heart of London, it is almost the only surviving out-of-door public pleasure resort left in the West-End, wherein fashion may display itself and take exercise, since St. James’s Park has now no social life, and Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, Old Ranelagh, and Cremorne are long since dead. ”

“ Peter Pape put the question with that grin, half ironic and wholly serious, with which he had faced other such posers in his past. To him, the West come East, this park was the heart of the town—Gotham’s great, green heart. By its moods it controlled the pulse of rich and poor alike; showed to all, sans price or prejudice, that beauty which is the love of nature made visible; inspired the most uncouth and unlearned with the responses of the cultured and the erudite.
The human heart was capable of any emotion, from small to great. Any deed, then, might be done within the people’s park. ”

“ James’s Park will be as famous to our descendants for our deeds as it is now to us for the presence of our ancestors. Is not the Mall yet one of the most favoured resorts of the British aristocracy? Do not the carriages of the nobility and gentry rattle over its broad bosom to dinner parties, to opera, to concerts, and to balls? We have seen their chariot lamps a hundred times—we humble pedestrians and plebeians—gleaming among the tufted trees, wills-o’-the-wisp of Belgravia and Tyburnia. ”

“ James’s Park, where all the world of beauty and wit is to be met walking up and down in the gayest, easiest way, everybody familiar and acquainted, with the exception of a few women in masks, who are never to be spoken to or spoken about. ”

“ Wild and beautiful, no doubt, was the Hyde Park of Queen Anne, but it was not the luxurious garden that we now know. Let us obliterate for a moment from our mind’s eye the well-kept grounds of our favourite resort, with the waters of the Serpentine sparkling in the sun, and replace them by thickets and brushwood growing on marshy ground, here and there stagnant pools, with the pungent smell that ever pervades any tract of swampy forest-land ”

“ James’s Park is a genuine piece of country, and of English country; huge old trees, real meadows, a large pond peopled with ducks and water-fowl; cows and sheep, in an enclosed space, fed on the grass, which is always fresh. There are even sheep in the narrow green border that surrounds Westminster Abbey; these people love the country in their hearts. It is sufficient to read their literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Thomson to Wordsworth and Shelley, to find proofs of this. What a contrast to the Tuileries, the Champs-Elysées, the Luxembourg! ”

“ It is strong on the smooth sculptured turf below the Round Tower and the rose garden in the ditch, though quaintly alleviated by the gorse above that; still strong in the avenues of great elms in the Home Park, the lime trees, the grass, as smooth as a lake and untrodden save by birds, under the Castle hill and the high rookery trees. If you escape it among the bracken and the warty oaks of the Great Park, it is suddenly upon you with violence when you look up at Snow Hill and see the colossal copper statue of Farmer George on horseback, more magnificent and less amiable now [14] than in life. ”

“ Next to its fine position on a very beautiful reach of the Thames, the chief glory of Richmond—a glory shared, however, by five other parishes, Petersham, Ham, Kingston, Putney, and Mortlake—is its noble park, known as the New or Great Park, to distinguish it from the one that was connected with the palace. It comprises two thousand acres of charming undulating scenery, grand oak woods and plantations of other trees alternating with fern-clad dells and dales, in the midst of which are the picturesque Pen Ponds, so called because they are near the enclosures for the deer. ”

“ Herne’s oak has gone now. It stood in the Home Park, a grim withered riven stump near the footpath to Datchet, until some fifty or sixty years ago; and few cared to pass it at midnight.
But Windsor Park in daytime has nothing eerie about it. It, and the wide bracken-covered, sandy forest country that surrounds it, is delightful in Spring, or on a hot summer’s day. Or in autumn, when the leaves and bracken are turning, one must go far to find a more beautiful district. The whole country is steeped in history and romance. ”

“ Now, the Serpentine in Hyde Park never had a motor launch, and bathing is allowed in it only before breakfast and at eve.
The best known of London's parks come where they are not wanted exceedingly. Hyde and St. James's and the Green Park and Kensington Gardens are all open spaces in areas where the streets are wide and the rooms large and light, and the poor can use and enjoy them only by walking some distance to do so and then would probably rather be on Hampstead Heath with its absence of restrictions. But Victoria Park is emphatically the right park in the right place. ”

“ Truly Hyde Park has an unparalleled record. For four hundred years the makers of history, politicians, beauty, nobility, bravery—and knavery, alas!—have all tendered homage to the charm of its acres, its noble trees, its grassy sward. Generation after generation has proclaimed love for it; and now, indeed, what would the babies and the beauties do without the famous stretch from Marble Arch to Piccadilly? ”

“ Stepney, Hampstead, Westend, and Peckham fairs have been crushed by the police, that ‘stern, rugged nurse’ of national morality; and although Greenwich fair continues, it is any thing but what it used to be. Greenwich, however, will always have a charm: the fine park remains—trees, glades, turf, and the view from the observatory, one of the noblest in the world—before you the towers of these palaces built for a monarch’s residence, now ennobled into a refuge from life’s storms for the gallant defenders of their country, after their long and toilsome pilgrimage—then the noble river ”

“ James's Park is associated in contemporary minds with nothing but amusing recollections of bands of music, marching soldiers, maid-servants and children, drinkings of "milk from the cow," the hoop-petticoats of the court days of George the Third, and fading images of passages in novels, or of shabby-genteel debtors sitting lounging on the benches. A little further back in point of time we see a novelist himself, Richardson, walking in it, with other invalids, for his health; then Swift crossing it from Suffolk Street in his way 432 to Chelsea, or thinking of the Spectator and Rosamond's Pond ”

“ James’s Park, will apply with tenfold force to the inhabitants of Poplar or Whitechapel, and it will also enable us to estimate the intense pleasure which those summer-trips organised by the friends of our Sunday and Ragged Schools afford to the young poor of our metropolis. A blade of grass to them is a rarity, and, in their eyes, more precious than emeralds to a duchess. ”

“ James Hamilton—after whom Hamilton Place was named—was appointed Ranger. Some one with a money-making turn of mind evidently thought it would be a good plan to utilise land for growing fruit, and Hamilton began negotiations for enclosing a portion of the grounds as an orchard. Later in the reign some of the deer were restored to the Park, and an ornamental path and wall were made round it. A more substantial brick wall, 61⁄2 feet high inside and 8 feet outside, was built by George I. to enclose the Park, and remained standing until 1828, when it was replaced by open iron railings. ”

“ The stillness, enclosed in the far, inexorable roar of the town, was alive with the myriad passions, hopes, and loves of multitudes of struggling human atoms; for in spite of the disapproval of that great body of Forsytes, the Municipal Council—to whom Love had long been considered, next to the Sewage Question, the gravest danger to the community—a process was going on that night in the Park, and in a hundred other parks, without which the thousand factories, churches, shops, taxes, and drains, of which they were custodians, were as arteries without blood, a man without a heart. ”

“ The parks of London have been described so very often that we must pass them with brief allusion. Their vast extent is what first strikes the American visitor with astonishment, especially those who have moulded their ideas after Boston Common, or even Central Park of New York. Hyde Park, in London, contains three hundred and ninety acres; and we took a lounge in Rotten Row at the fashionable hour, between five and six in the afternoon, when the drive was crowded with stylish equipages; some with coroneted panels and liveried footmen, just such as we see in pictures. ”

“ Of these, none were more agreeable to me than the promenades in the great parks—Hyde Park, the Green Park, Regent’s Park, which last, alone, is several English miles in circumference. On Sundays, one sees them crowded with well-dressed people, mostly of the working classes; children tumble about freely on the green turf, which remains green and fresh notwithstanding, or feed with bread the beautiful swans or other aquatic birds which swim about on the river-like winding pieces of water. ”

“ That of Hyde is worth walking in at five on a fine week-day, if it be only to see how the footmen and the horses enjoy themselves; and still more so at four on a fine Sunday, to see how the citizens do the same. The Green Park, in virtue of the youths and maidens who meander about it in all directions on the latter day, looks, at a distance, like a meadow strewn all over with moving wild-flowers. And the great alley in Kensington Gardens, when the fashionables please to patronise it, is as pretty to look down upon, from the Pavilion at top, as one of Watteau’s pictures. ”

“ I think the taste for displays of this nature is lessening in England; though, within the limits set by usage, I perceive no falling off in the equipages, but rather an improvement in form and lightness.
The road around Regent’s Park appears open to every thing; but into St. James’s, none but the privileged can enter except on foot. The Green Park is exclusively for pedestrians, being little more than a pretty and extensive play-ground for children. Kensington Gardens can be entered by all properly dressed pedestrians. ”

“ The park is nothing more than a semicircle, formed of an alley of trees, which enclose a large green area in the middle of which is a marshy pond.
The cows feed on this green turf, and their milk is sold here on the spot, quite new.
In all the alleys or walks there are benches, where you may rest yourself. When you come through the Horse Guards (which is provided with several passages) into the park, on the right hand is St. James’s Palace, or the king’s place of residence, one of the meanest public buildings in London. ”

“ Milk-vendors, boasting their descent from the original holders, have still their cow-stall at the park corner under the elm-trees. In the distance the grey old abbey, with its delicate tracery, appears at intervals above the trees and buildings; and, though so near the city smoke, the Ornithological Society breeds many beautiful aquatic birds on a small island on the Ornamental Water. St. James's Park is a series of pictures; the sketcher, too, will find many convenient seats, as well as charming views. ”

“ Here opens a new fan of woodland walks. The road southwards leads to Gomshall station in about three miles. The best way from Felday to the top of Leith Hill is through a park gate beyond the “Hollybush,” then diverging on the right of the drive as an embowered lane where boards marked “private” keep one from straying till a road is reached, across which an open slope leads to the tower. ”

“ Earlier in the year, when the trees are throwing out their fresh green leaves, the almond blossom glows, the grass looks fresh, and the daffodils and narcissi give hope of coming achievement. Possibly Hyde Park possesses no trees so ancestral as the old elm which stands on the edge of the lake in the neighbourhood of St. James’s Park, beneath which the monks at Westminster are said to have fished for a Friday’s meal. It still bears leaves, and though its roots are plastered up, seems likely to thrive for many years. ”

“ But those Gardens and that Park were not sacred to James. Forsytes and tramps, children and lovers, rested and wandered day after day, night after night, seeking one and all some freedom from labour, from the reek and turmoil of the streets. ”